The present invention relates to a navigation device mounted on a vehicle or the like, and particularly to a technique for giving guidance to an Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) lane at a tollgate.
As Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) develop, an ETC system (a system for collecting a toll without stopping a vehicle) is introduced to a toll road such as an expressway. Accordingly, lanes (hereinafter, referred to as ETC lanes) adapted for ETC are provided at a tollgate.
However, not all vehicles are mounted with an in-vehicle ETC unit. Further, in some vehicles, an ETC card may not be set in the in-vehicle ETC unit although they are mounted with the unit. Thus, a tollgate also has conventional lanes for collecting a toll by hand as in the past.
Thus, there is known a technique (Patent Document 1) that considers mixture of ETC lanes and conventional lanes to guide a vehicle to an ETC lane by using information on lane layouts, which has been previously stored or is acquired by communication with a tollgate.
Patent Document 1: Japanese Un-examined Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2000-146598
According to the above-described technique, a navigation device should previously have information on a lane layout of each tollgate or map data including route information (such as links) for leading to each lane.
Thus, a navigation device without such map data can not guide a vehicle to a lane to run. Further, in order to incorporate new information such as the above-described information to already-provided map data, it is necessary to change the map data. This takes time and entails cost.
Further, in the case of a technique where an ETC system transmits information on a lane layout, the ETC system itself should have antennas used for communication according to Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) or the like.
Thus, in the case where an ETC system does not have such antennas, a navigation device can not guide a vehicle to a lane to run. Further, it takes time and entails cost for an ETC system to have such antennas.
In the present period of spreading of an ETC system, it is difficult to prepare map data furnished with sufficient lane information previously, and it is costly and takes time to accommodate such map data to the ETC systems of the whole of a country. Further, it takes time and entails cost also to improve the ETC systems of the whole of a country such that the ETC systems can transmit information on lane layouts.
Thus, an object of the present invention is to provide a technique for guiding a vehicle to a lane to run even if the navigation device uses map data that does not include lane information.